A big family has always been a goal of mine. It was the only thing my parents did right, having four of us so we’d be strong enough together to face whatever life threw at us.
When I look at my girls, though, I don’t know what I was thinking. They are vulnerabilities. My father had himself an army of scrappers. I’m collecting porcelain dolls. I’d never trade them, not for anything, but I need sons to help protect them.
I feel like Aragorn at Helm’s Deep. There are so many dangers—kidnappers, traffickers, blackmailers, schemers, scammers, con men, and lotharios—and those are only the human threats. That’s not including the microplastics, forever chemicals, pesticides, PCBs, BPAs, the nineteenth-century diseases making a comeback, the rising seas and hurricanes, wildfires and floods.
My aspirations were rational, conventional—a wife, children, a peaceful home. I got Cora, Pearl, and Winnie—soft bodies, breakable bones, fragile hearts. I was unprepared.
I kiss my thumb and gently press it against Winnie’s warm, chubby cheek. Babies her size are so terrifyingly delicate. She only weighs thirteen pounds. The plates in her head aren’t even fused together yet. It would be so easy for someone to take her, so easy for her to disappear and never be found.
Before you become a father, they don’t tell you about the insidious, constant terror. Or maybe they do, and I wasn’t listening. Maybe my arrogance made me think the shit everyone always talks about wouldn’t apply to me.
I watch Winnie sleep for a few minutes until I’m sureshe’s out for the count. I have half a mind to pass out on Cora’s daybed, but pissing her off first thing in the morning is not the smart move. I tug Winnie’s sleep sack down so the collar isn’t creeping up around her neck and quietly let myself out of the nursery.
I’m wired. My phone is bricked. The Madeira I drank is hitting me hard, and my bed feels too far away. I lean against the wall outside the nursery and contemplate the long walk down the hall.
I want my fucking wife. I had her. She was right there, in my arms, and she slipped away. That’s all she does anymore—slip away.
I sink down the wall onto my butt, every muscle aching for no apparent reason except exhaustion. I’ll just sit here a minute.
Sighing, I stretch my legs straight. My shirt and pants are damp. I’m missing a button.
I had her, and I lost her.
And that’s what I was always waiting for, wasn’t it, to fumble her so badly that she’d leave and never come back?
That’s what I was bracing for, day after day, year after year since Pearl was born, and I stopped being smugly pleased with the perfect wife and mother I’d secured and started worrying about what she was thinking behind those blue eyes. Whether she was really happy. What would happen when she got old enough to realize that she’d traded too much for an easy life. That I’d asked too much.
And then, when the waiting became unbearable, I put myself out of my misery.
It’s so obvious now in hindsight, with drunk clarity. So fucking pathetic. I drove her away because I couldn’t bear waiting to lose her anymore.
I got what I had coming—the consequences of my actions.
It would humble another man to be this stupid and weak, but my arrogance is natural-born, hardwired in my DNA.
I sit on the floor, shameless, outside the nursery where my wife hides from me, until I fall asleep, slumped against the wall in a damp suit.
The master of my fate.
The captain of my own destruction.
12
CORA
Pearl wakesme by shaking my shoulder and announcing in her outdoor voice, a hair from my face, “Daddy is asleep on the floor!”
I gasp and sit straight up, my heart in my throat. My head pounds, and my teeth are so furry, my lips are sticking to them. “What?” I mumble.
Pearl grabs my hand to drag me out of bed. “He’s sleeping on the floor, Mommy. In hisdayclothes.”
I kick my legs free from a cat mermaid flat sheet and stagger behind her, memories from last night shoving themselves into my brain like people into a crowded elevator. I was naked. He kissed me. Delaney called. I dropped his phone in the toilet.
I hope Pearl forgot to flush.
Winnie is wide awake and babbling when we pass her crib, so I scoop her up. Pearl beckons me to slip through the cracked open door to the hallway.
Adrian is indeed sleeping on the floor, seated and slumped over like a scarecrow. Thankfully, I see his chest moving before my nerves have the chance to totally freak out. I had no idea he was that drunk last night.
